Translations between two different languages often involve difficulties in cases where the meaning of individual words is further constrained by the context of usage. When people learn a second language that is not their native language, there are typically many choices of words that seem like they would translate correctly, but are actually not used in certain groupings, or collocations, in typical usage among native speakers. Such collocations might be syntactically or grammatically correct in an abstract sense, but are outside of normal usage, and would often instinctively seem peculiar or awkward to native speakers. Combinations of words in a language often conform to set patterns that form single lexical items, so that even groups of words that have similar meanings and are ordered in a similar grammatical relationship may not fall into any lexical item within the native usage of the language, whether or not the lexical item is explicitly preconceived by native speakers as constraining the language from alternative usages.
For example, someone learning English as a second language might find “strong” and “powerful” as two alternate translations of a single word in her native language, and “to make” and “to do” as two alternate translations of a different word. Without very much experience in English usage, the learner might write “I had a cup of powerful tea” rather than “I had a cup of strong tea”, or “I did a plan” instead of “I made a plan”. Similar errors of collocation may be typical of a native speaker of any language, who is learning any other language in which she is not a native speaker. Such erroneous collocations of words are typically avoided only after a long period of contextual experience and interactive practice with the language, and typically cannot be resolved using a dictionary or any other type of fast and easily accessible language reference.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.